Americans Are Very Weird & Immature About Sex
Photo by Dainis Graveris on Unsplash
I say this as an American who grew up and had their sexual awakening in America: we are a very strange country when it comes to sex. We fetishize it in nearly everything we do. I see it in our media where women and men are dressed in ways that accentuate their bodies. I can find it in our many songs about love and sex. I see it in our humor where many jokes are “dick this” and “I f@cked that.” I see it in our bachelor and bachelorette parties, where penis merchandise is plastered over everything, and infidelity is teased in the way of strippers.
At the same time, however, we shame nearly everyone for wanting it. Conservatives preach the values of abstinence-only education in schools and chastise anyone who dares to have sex before marriage. It’s our duty to have sex, but only if it's not for pleasure or enjoyment. Sex is something that we are told that we must have, and yet we must also hate ourselves for wanting it. “Don’t be a prude,” the advice goes, “but also don’t be a slut.”
This dichotomy underlays everything we do, and it's not just conservatives who are susceptible to it. This awkwardness around sex infects even the most leftist among us, and we need to take stock of how weird this fixation with sex is in America.
There are some obvious ways that we are strange about sex, and then there are the not-so-obvious ones. The obvious ones are the shaming campaigns put forth by conservative actors and movements. There are a lot of people who actively lobby to prevent people, particularly teenagers, from having sex at all unless it's done “the right way.”
The most infamous example of this is abstinence-only education campaigns promoted by conservatives in the 80s and up to this day. These programs claimed to be the most effective way to prevent teenage pregnancy, but really they were simply about preventing sex until marriage. All the research we have indicates that they were not very effective with curbing sexual impulses and came with them some pretty intense stigmatization. “While abstinence is theoretically effective, in actual practice, intentions to abstain from sexual activity often fail,” says John Santelli, professor of Population and Family Health at the Mailman School.
The legacy of these programs means that there are 11 states in the Union that require abstinence-only education to be mentioned in schools and 28 states that require it to be stressed. The ridiculousness of these programs is made fun of the world over. You can watch it be scrutinized in comedies such as Glee (see episode Showmance), where the character Quinn Fabray (Dianna Agron) is president of the celibacy club — only to realize that she is a sexual being throughout the series. You can see it ridiculed in the Garfunkel and Oates song “F@ck me in the ass ’cause I love Jesus,” which is all about making fun of how some Christians infamously have anal sex to “save” themselves for marriage.
It’s easy to scoff at this mentality, but there are other ways that we are weird about sex that don’t fall along clear political lines. An obvious example is how we view nudity, linking it to sexual activity regardless of the context. It’s illegal in most parts of the country to be nude in public places, and even in the privacy of your own home if a member of the public can see your naked ass through an open window or in your own yard. These instances can be labeled indecent behavior. Even in the liberal state of California, nudity is a felony if you expose yourself in any public place or in any private place where there are people who could be offended or annoyed. It’s a system of laws that coddle the comfort of the most triggered. As a culture, we basically prescribe to the idea that nudity is inherently sexual, and if you inconvenience other people’s comfort with it, you are the one at fault.
Nudity, though, is not inherently sexual. Plenty of people get naked because they enjoy the experience and are not trying to achieve an orgasm. All over the world, you can participate in naked marathons, naked bicycle races, naked yoga sessions, and more that have nothing to do with sex. These body parts are being sexualized by the onlooker, not necessarily by the nudist, and that’s just creepy. If you claim that nudity is sexual at all moments, then you are the one doing that sexualization, not the object of your fixation.
And, of course, we are weird about nudity in very sexist ways. Men can generally show less skin than women. No one bats an eye at a topless male runner, but we give women and female-presenting nonbinary people a tough time about revealing their breasts. Although it is changing for the better, several states treat male and female toplessness differently. Indiana, for example, explicitly forbids the showing of the “female" nipple, and there is still reported harassment in states where it’s 100% legal. After a court ruling made female toplessness legal in six states, including Utah, a judge there refused to dismiss charges of lewdness in a case where a woman was topless in front of her step-children. Note the father, who was also topless at the time, has not been charged.
This distinction even applies to when people are breastfeeding their children. While you may technically have the legal right to breastfeed in all 50 states, not all of these polities necessarily exempt you from public indecency laws. This oversight means breastfeeders have been threatened repeatedly by the police over the years for being “indecent,” including a high-profile incident in 2016 by a Georgian police officer against a woman named Savvy Shukla inside a Piggly Wiggly grocery store. According to Savvy Shukla’s own account on Facebook, the police officer claimed to be harassing her because what she was doing was “offensive.”
The main excuse given by weird Americans for policing others' bodies is that they protect the greater public, particularly children, from indecency. However, there does not appear to be a whole lot of compelling evidence that nudity by itself traumatizes children. While coerced nudity (i.e., forcing another individual to get naked) is certainly abusive, the act of witnessing another person’s nakedness does not seem to correlate with harm from any study I have read. By all means, please send me a meta-study if you disagree.
Yet despite the obvious lack of evidence, this “save the children” argument is used everywhere in our society. Since sex itself is considered shameful, its mere suggestion is used to discourage support in activities that have nothing to do with sex. People have used the specter of sexual deviancy to discourage interest in a whole host of activities and people.
As an example, “Kink” (i.e., consensual, non-traditional sexual, sensual, or intimate behaviors) is often claimed to be inherently sexual, and therefore shameful enough to be kept out of family-friendly places (i.e., most places). Recently, there was a leftist streamer who riled up a controversy by insisting that Kink should not be at main Pride events, tweeting: “Kink at Pride makes people uncomfortable and makes the event less accessible when accessibility should be a priority. Keep less family-friendly stuff to the many, many afterparties and adjacent, private venues every Pride has.”
Undoubtedly, many people are uncomfortable with Kink, but discomfort is not the same thing as harm. As with nudity, Kink is not always sexual (notice the words sensual and intimate in the definition I used). Many Kinky clubs and events explicitly ban sex acts there. So again, we have people sexualizing other adults for wearing things like dog masks or leather harnesses during Pride parades when that’s not happening at all in this particular situation. They are doing this, they claim, to appease an imaginary child traumatized by the sight of objects they barely comprehend, but in actuality, it seems to be rationalizing their own distaste in Kink.
Now, there might be some line we want to draw here about not having sex in public to avoid “consent violations” (i.e., when someone violates someone else's physical or emotional boundaries), but that has nothing to do with Kink. It also has less to do with “protecting children” and more about protecting the rights of the people around you. We should care about adults when their consent is violated too. However, it is not a consent violation to wear a harness, yip in public, or dorn a mask. In the context of Pride parades, no one is yanking on someone’s dick, pleasuring themselves in public, or demanding that you perform an activity with them, which would be a violation, even if it wasn’t sexual.
Just because you are uncomfortable with something doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done in public. We don’t ban fireworks because they can trigger someone’s PTSD. We don’t ban the distribution of condoms in public places, including pride parades, just because they might be used in sex acts at another point in time. We don’t ban public displays of intimacy because they can maybe inconvenience asexual people or conservatives. We shouldn’t tell someone they can’t dress in fetish gear or run topless because maybe you can imagine a scenario where it can be sexual.
This fixation of using sex as a cudgel to ban practices we don’t like is weird. It’s using our shame with sex to limit human expression, and that’s very telling for how we as a society perceive sex in general. This shame has nothing to do with protecting children, and in fact, harms many more than it “protects.”
The worst part about pearl-clutching over sex in America is that all of this weirdness has some pretty messed-up consequences. We talk about protecting others when we use the sexualization of a person or object to pass more oppressive laws, but rarely do we think about what that practically means. When you push for banning human expression that you find uncomfortable, even if it's not harmful, the way our society is structured inevitably means that you have to use the force of the law to fine, arrest, or jail perceived offenders.
It was not too long ago that the same arguments used by people condemning nudity, breastfeeding, or Kink were used to jail queer people for engaging in consensual sex and other acts of intimacy. There used to be sodomy laws (a Biblical reference to the destruction of the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah) all over the United States that initially banned non-procreative sex in general and slowly became about banning queer sex specifically. These laws were not only used to arrest queer people in sting operations, but also as a pretext to deny members of the LBTQIA+ community employment protections, adoption rights, and other equal protections under the law.
A chief pretext for this discrimination was to protect the public’s sense of decency, which is why many of these laws are popularly referred to as “crime against nature” laws. Yet they didn’t just “protect” young people from the danger of “homosexuals,” but jailed them too. In one example, an 18-year-old named Randall Menges was arrested under Idaho’s “crimes against nature” law in 1993 for having consensual sex with two 16-year-olds, which in the state of Idaho would be legal for a straight person. He ended up serving a seven-year prison sentence.
Even after sodomy laws were technically overturned in the 2003 Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas, “crime against nature” laws still remain on the books in nine states. Police have used these laws to harass queer people as recently as 2015, and while the laws may be outdated, their legacy continues to impact people to this day. In some states, people convicted of sodomy laws before the Lawrence ruling still have to register as sex offenders. Randall Menges, for example, had his status as a sex offender expunged this year. This feat happened only after moving to another state that allowed it, and the state’s Attorney General still plans to fight it. A reminder that he was 18-years-old at the time of his arrest — convicted by a law often justified as existing to “protect children.”
Today, we see similar sentiments with how many trans people are arrested and harassed by police officers due to being associated with sex work. Since our society has a negative view of that activity, this association often detrimentally impacts the trans community. For example, until recently, New Yorkers were prosecuted by section 240.37 of the penal code, an anti-loitering statute that officers used to target perceived sex workers. Infamously called the “walking while trans” law, it affected trans people, most notably trans people of color, for no other reason than officers assuming that they were sex workers. As activist Bianey García remarked of her own run-in with a police officer:
“I tried to explain to them that I wasn’t doing sex work, that the person walking next to me was my boyfriend. He also tried to explain that we are partners, and the officer told my boyfriend, ‘You have to go or you’re going to be arrested.’”
Bianey García ended up pleading guilty because she was an undocumented immigrant at the time who did not know her rights. As of February 2021, this law was repealed in New York, but similar ones are still on the books in other states such as California. Some of the victims of these laws are not too old either. Bianey García was only 18 when her reported incident happened. We are so paternalistically wrapped up in “protecting children” that we sometimes forget that children are also human beings engaged in acts of intimacy and sensuality. When we criminalize sexuality — whether it be actual sexuality or just the perceived sexuality of someone’s gender identity — we don’t just end up hurting adults. Young people will inevitability fall into the crossfire.
Even when this repression does not lead to direct violence with the state, it can create a lot of stigmatization that harms children all the same. We see in many polls that children are not getting the sex advice they need from their parents, and a significant amount of them are not being asked about sex by their doctors at all. This knowledge gap might partly correlate with this country’s abysmal sexual education. Only 18 states require that sex education be medically accurate, and that can have a knock-on effect as both children and adults struggle to obtain the right information.
Yet this lack of communication does not result in less sex. This stigmatization and uncertainty merely lead to more unsafe sex. According to the CDC in a study published in 2019, condom usage among sexually active high schoolers has dropped to 54%, bringing with it an increase in Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs). For example, a 2018 CDC estimate placed 21% of all new HIV infections among youths between the ages 13 to 24 — a number that has been steadily dropping but is still high. An active minority of teens seem to be engaged in increasingly riskier behavior, which does not always result in more STIs. Sometimes a lack of a supportive environment has teens engaging in riskier settings to obtain the sex they are denied.
Take the example of Kink again. Some sexual tweens and teenagers engage with Kinks. I have found many anecdotes of teenagers engaged in choking during sex (not all of it consensual). I also came across a large swath of testimonials of teens expressing an interest in BDSM. As one user writes in an online forum, I will not be linking to: “I’m a 14 year old girl, and I haven’t been influenced by any sexual content during my life. But, I remember that since I was 10, I was intrigued by the idea of BDSM. I’ve had the kink since I was 8! Is it bad to be interested in this at my age?” This comment not only hits home the idea that people can be curious about Kink starting at a very early age, but that those desires are not necessarily sexual.
I realize that this is an uncomfortable subject to talk about. I have been cringing at myself for the last hour writing this entire section, but it leads to problems when we don’t talk about this reality. Since Kink revolves around power exchange of some sort, this makes the principles of trust and consent paramount in these relationships. However, Kink is largely an underground scene. Although it seems to be less rapey than the larger population, there are definitely “dominants” or “doms” (i.e., people who strive for control in sexual or intimate situations) who take advantage of these power exchanges to justify their abusive behavior.
Teenagers are not always removed from that equation. In one anecdote, a 17-year-old tried to move halfway across the country from New York to Lawton, Oklahoma, to be a live-in submissive for a 59-year-old dominant and his 26-year-old girlfriend. The young girl in question made this change because the dominant was a prominent BDSM author, and she was curious about the BDSM lifestyle. The power dynamics in age and status alone make this relationship questionable. If Kink were more widely taught and explored among teens, it's doubtful she would have felt the need to move halfway across the country to learn more about BDSM.
We have such a protectionist outlook when it comes to young people and sex. However, teens and tweens can also have desires, and they frankly deserve to have an environment where they can learn about sex, sensuality, and intimacy safely. I would rather a child learn about the dynamics of Kink and safe sex at a Pride event than the more seedy avenues that are out there. Repression doesn’t stop sexually active tweens and teenagers from learning and performing sex. It simply ensures that the information they learn is not always credible and that their partners are not always kind.
My fellow Americans, we are so weird about sex that we would rather people be abused and neglected than our own psyches made uncomfortable. We need to ask ourselves what’s more important: a child possibly being uncomfortable by the sight of something that in another context can be sexual, or actual children being endangered because they cannot have sex safely; a stranger made uncomfortable by the sight of nudity or a person being able to express themselves free from harassment; the sight of sex workers not being visible to the general public or a trans person being able to walk safely down the street.
If you take away one thing from this article, let it be this: comfort and safety are not the same things. We should not be in the business of making everyone comfortable at all times because such a thing is impossible. People have contradictory definitions of what comfort is, and as we can see, this standard of valuing comfort in general usually has us defaulting to the more mainstream position. While this rhetoric sounds inclusive, it weaponizes our shame of sex to push for regressive laws that ultimately harm countless people, including children.
Think of the children, America. If you want them to be truly safe, then you will prioritize their education. You will seek to ensure that they not only learn the most medically accurate information possible but that they have the tools and resources to learn about their desires safely.
Stop being weird, America, and end this policing of sexuality. The children will thank you.